Freshers, welcome. Everyone else, welcome back! It’s a new year at Warwick, and a new term filled with stuff to get your teeth stuck in to. Besides the wonders of academic excellence that Warwick has to offer, student media here at Warwick have a lot of exciting things planned for this year that you should definitely get involved in, whether you’re a returning student or starting afresh.

First of all, there’s us – the Boar! We’re the official newspaper for the University of Warwick, and we write about all sorts of issues important to students, from news reports increases in fees to the hottest trends on campus. We publish a newspaper every two weeks that’s distributed all over campus, and update our website theboar.org whenever we can. We have sections for travel writing, music reviews, comment pieces and in-depth features. We organise trips to journalism-related activities and live-blog events across campus. If you’ve got an opinion on something, we want to hear about it. Students provoke debate, that’s what we do.

Radio Warwick, our own radio station broadcasts on FM radio across campus and can be listened to online. They broadcast live shows featuring a mix of music, news, sport and general chit-chat from a range of students. They broadcast live on the piazza on Open Days and arrivals weekend, so perhaps you’ve seen them blaring chart music at you on your way to your halls today. RaW also produce a Varsity special, broadcast live from Battle of the Bands and collaborate with WTV on the Students’ Union elections.

For Warwick TV, Big D is their biggest event, featuring an evening of interviews and analysis on the Students’ Union officer elections and broadcasting the results live. WTV also cover the SU Summer Party where they meet and interview a range of awesome bands such as Feeder, and this year they chatted to Noah and the Whale. They also film a range of news and documentary programmes, arts and culture clips and sports events throughout the year. At Warwick TV you can get involved in every stage of the production process, behind and in front of the camera, regardless of your experience level.

The newest addition to Warwick’s media hub is SIBE, who focus on producing topical documentaries and engage on issues relevant to Warwick students and beyond. SIBE produce live chat shows Monday Live and Breakout on a weekly basis, getting a range of students involved in debated online through their interactive show format. They have also broadcasted events live this year, such as Warwick Higher Education Summit, One World Week Forums and Warwick Entrepreneurs’ Apprentice. SIBE aim to bring to the front a new form of broadcast media that is interactive about anything going down on campus and providing an engaging space to talk about it in.

Warwick is renound for its student societies, and it has among the most in the country. Aside from making new friends, our societies give you a fantastic opportunity to do things you’ve never done before.

Running around campus with cameras, microphones and pens will also be a brilliant way to practise the skills you will need in a career in the media. Whether you’re considering jobs in film editing, becoming a theatre critic or a have aspirations to become a Radio 1 producer, Warwick’s media societies can help prepare you and give you advice on how to get there. We can give you training on a range of programmes and equipment, provide opportunities to visit places such as the Press Association, enter the Guardian Student Media Awards, or simply just offer some constructive feedback on your work.

And it’s not just the conventional things that we can offer you experience in either. Passion for advertising and business? Join our sales team, selling online and print advertising to a range of companies. Love fixing technology and fiddling around with cameras? Join our engineering departments and fiddle with gadgets to your heart’s content. Have a passion for grammar and become irate at the sight of bad grammar? Help our sub-editing team to iron out the mistakes we (accidentally) leave in after that all-nighter.

We can also help you develop a portfolio of work ready to jump into the media world with; being able to present a front page exclusive story or have examples of a documentary you’ve put together is exactly what employers want to see from graduates. Some people student media as getting all the bad writing out first, before you go and start applying for jobs. I think it’s considerably more than that, giving you the chance to experiment, get it right (and wrong) and more importantly, to learn from it and prepare you for a future career.

Aside from that, many of us at the Boar/RaW/WTV/SIBE are media junkies. The likelihood is (if you’re still reading this) that you’re interested in the media too. Whether you pick up the newspaper, love films or secretly wish you had your own politics show on Radio 4, you will meet people here you’ll get on with and forge close friendships with. Contacts are great whatever career you’re considering, but we also make great company at the pub, and hold incredibly long but drunken bar crawls across Leamington.

To sum up: get involved in Warwick’s media societies. Make a film, host a radio show, showcase an interactive chat broadcast, have an exclusive front-page article published with your name on it, and feel how awesome it is to take part in. We’re fun, yet serious, we have a laugh and – when we (accidentally) delete the files on deadline day – we have a cry too.

For more information, check out our websites below, send us an email or pop into our offices in SUHQ.

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Digital journalist for The Times - Red Box. natasha[dot]clark[at]thetimes[dot]co[dot]uk
Previously @TwitterUK, @politicshome and @thesundaytimes. Previously freelance for the Guardian and the Independent. I also work for What's New in Publishing and co-editing Wannabe Hacks.
Previously I was Editor @ The Boar, the University of Warwick students' newspaper. I am a graduate of History and Politics from Warwick, and of Newspaper Journalism at City University.
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